Study: Less Than 40% Of Donald Trump's Twitter Following Is Eligible To Vote

Despite the fact that earlier this week presidential hopeful Donald Trump made his way to the top of the extensive GOP field in an Iowa poll as the first choice of 22 percent of those surveyed, a study of Trump's social media audience found that the polarizing businessman's position might be weaker than polls indicate.

The study, conducted by audience analytics company Macromeasures, found that Trump trails his GOP rivals in a handful of crucial metrics in terms of his
Twitter following. Macromeasures compared Trump's social audience to those of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina. The most glaring discovery was that of Trump's Twitter following, a mere 39.4 percent were actually eligible to vote—the lowest of any GOP candidate analyzed. To put this in perspective, 95.7 percent of Fiorina's following could cast a ballot. To determine this, Macromeasures filtered out Twitter followers under 18 years old based on detected high school or middle school student status. Additionally, the study filtered out followers determined to be outside the United States, with little other U.S. interaction on the platform. According to a company spokesperson, the data on this group of followers was found on the individual level through Macromeasures' machine learning and natural language processing platform, which offered strong signal into users that were unlikely to be American.

On top of that, Trump only received 0.9 percent of social media activity coming out of the key, early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to Macromeasures' findings (defined by hashtag use by Twitter users with primary residences in these three states).

It is very important to note, however, that this study is based off the candidates' Twitter followings, which varies among the candidates and does not represent the voting population at large. This data is broken down by percent not raw numbers, so the size of a candidate's following impacts the size of the group identified.

The analysis also found that Trump's following is weak among women, young conservatives and people with strong Christian values.

Rubio leads the pack in engagement with women on Twitter, which accounts for 44 percent of his total engagement. In the wake of his flare-up with
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly it is not surprising that a mere 28 percent of Trump's engagement comes from women. Rubio also leads in engagement from young conservatives. The study found that university-level students account for 14 percent of Rubio's recent followers on social media, nearly twice that of Trump and Fiorina at 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively. These groups were identified by a variety of criteria such as names, handles, followers and use of key hashtags and phrases.

It is Huckabee atop the field, however, when its comes to engaging with people who identify with Christian values on Twitter. Of Huckabee's followers, 37 percent fall into this camp. Comparatively, a mere 11 percent of Trump's followers identify as having strong Christian values. Similarly to the other metrics, Macromeasures filtered out followers who showed moderate to strong Christian based on their interactions on Twitter and followers. Again, this is reported as a percentage of total followers for each candidate.

Below is the full data breakdown from Macromeasures' study. Rand Paul, who wasn't included in the original study, has also been added to the table below.

I am a senior news producer for Forbes' technology channel. I previously covered breaking news at Vocativ and wrote about social media, marketing and technology at Inc. Magazine. I am a graduate of Northwestern University, where I majored in journalism and economics. Email ...